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With Michael Ots
86 Plays3 years ago
For many people, God and faith aren't the things they're most interested in. But most people are interested in (and have an opinion on!) big questions about life. What are those questions? How have they changed over the years? And how can we show that a Christian worldview makes the best sense of these life questions?
Michael Ots was Minister of Evangelism at Lansdowne Baptist Church in Bournemouth for five years before becoming a travelling evangelist. He is passionate about sharing his faith through university missions in the UK and outreaches in Europe with organisations such as IFES and the European Leadership Forum. His books include “What Kind of God?”, “What Kind of Hope?”, “But Is It True?” and his latest title “Making Sense of Life”. Find them all at 10ofThose.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Pep Talk Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Well hello and welcome to another exciting and stimulating and packed edition of pep talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Manister from the Sola Center for Public Christianity based in Dundee and I'm joined from all the way down the other end of the country by my my vivacious co-host
00:00:29
Speaker
It's a game on pep talk. We try to use different adjectives every episode. So I have my Rogers Theosaurus on my phone. My Vavacious co-host, Christy Mayer. Christy, how are you doing this afternoon? Doing well, thanks. Vavacious. I mean, I'll take that at the end of the year. I'll take that. Thanks, Andy. Yeah, take that and definitely put that in the bank. And if you're playing Scrabble on triple wood score, you know you're golden.
00:00:51
Speaker
Well, we are joined as ever by a kind of fascinating and stimulating guest, as we always like to have on pep talk.
Meet Michael Ott
00:01:00
Speaker
So we are joined from a leafy shire of Leicestershire by Michael Ott. Michael, welcome to pep talk. Hello, good to be with you.
00:01:08
Speaker
So for those who who don't know, Michael, Michael has been around for a long time, done stuff with Solas before, spoken at conferences and various bits and pieces. Michael is you are an independent itinerant evangelist. You work a lot with the Association of Evangelists. Evangelists, you're a lot with students and groups like IFEs and so on and so forth. So all kinds of bits and pieces that you do. You're also an author and I've got a new book, Making Sense of Life coming up in the in the autumn. I think is that right? That comes out.
00:01:38
Speaker
Excellent. But one of the things that I think interested us for getting you on the show, I should also mention, by the way, Michael is also the co-presenter of a wonderful podcast called Pod of the Gaps that Michael and I and Aaron Edwards, who's also been on pep talk, present. So I love the small Christian world that everyone's closely linked in with.
00:01:57
Speaker
with kind of everything else. But Michael, you do a lot of student kind of ministry as Christie has in the past and still does, and I do, but you particularly spend lots of time on university campuses.
Evolving University Campus Questions
00:02:09
Speaker
And of course, it fascinates me that it's often from the universities, right, that the big ideas and cultural shifts come. They start in some academic high on caffeine, gets an idea, and then it trickles out into the culture and things begin changing. So I wonder as you've been doing kind of
00:02:27
Speaker
ministry on campuses over the last recent years or so, you know, what are some of the nature of the questions that we're seeing about faith? In my hunch is some of those questions that are changing and that some of the issues that people have when it comes to thinking about the big questions of life and faith and God and not the ones they might have been 20 or 30 years ago. Is that the case? What are you seeing?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, good question. I should clarify before that. Describing myself as an itinerant evangelist is always slightly risky. A good friend of mine, another evangelist, used to describe himself as that and he once had a letter written to him and it said, dear illiterate evangelists.
00:03:05
Speaker
So maybe itinerant is not the... I heard the story actually of a random tangent of an occupational therapist who was going on a trip through the Middle East and was hauled over by security with a very irate immigration officer going, aha, so you admit it, you admit it. And they had misread it as occupation terrorist.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's like when you go into America and like the question is, do you intend to carry out terrorist activities? And it's like, like, like who is going to say yes to that?
Adapting Student Ministry
00:03:39
Speaker
life would get very interesting very quickly but um well yeah if you if you do want an interesting life you could say yes i guess um but uh yeah so as you say i do a lot of stuff in university campuses although ironically of course the last year i've been on very few university campuses and although still doing a lot of ministry with students via zoom and other platforms of course are available um so yeah i guess one of the things looking back you know i started student ministry in the um the early 2000s um
00:04:08
Speaker
the first student mission. I remember back in I think it was 2004 I was involved in one. So it was soon after 9-11 it was around the time that Richard Dawkins had written The God Delusion which became like a number one bestseller and like I think every MP in parliament had read it over their summer kind of recess and stuff. So it was a really significant book you know he was being called on to kind of chat shows and stuff and it looked like new atheism was the thing that was going to kind of take off although there wasn't much new about it. It was really just
00:04:38
Speaker
old atheism repackaged. And actually a lot of students had imbibed those ideas, you know some would have read Dawkins but even if they hadn't read him it was like these ideas percolate down and so you could as a way in kind of deal with the kind of antagonism that people had towards the Christian faith from the kind of new atheists as an avenue for conversation. So a lot of our talks and a lot of our conversations would start with some of people's kind of verbalised objections, you know why would God allow suffering or
00:05:08
Speaker
you know, why would God send people to hell and so on. And one of the things that we've discovered over the last 15 years or so is that those kind of questions have probably kind of dropped off in terms of like less people are asking them.
Shifting Student Belief Systems
00:05:22
Speaker
And this really came home to me a couple of years ago. I was in Croatia doing a university week and we were going around the campus asking people the question,
00:05:30
Speaker
does the presence of suffering in the world disprove the existence of God? And we kind of expected a number of people to say yes and then off the back of that to obviously have a conversation and pretty much everyone said no, which obviously was a bit of a killer for the conversation, so like where do you go from there? But then of course we'd ask them like well why, why not? And they would be like well what on earth has God got to do with suffering?
00:05:54
Speaker
And they had no kind of Christian framework. They hadn't thought through the kind of philosophical implications of an all powerful loving God, allowing suffering and all the things that go on with that. And so for them, it just wasn't an objection. It wasn't to kind of weigh in. And so these kind of classical kind of apologetic objections that we have
00:06:12
Speaker
may have been an issue for a previous generation, may still be an issue for probably kind of those in older generations perhaps, and potentially become issues for those who start to understand something about the Christian worldview as they start to think about how that works. But they're not the kind of start point for most students. Most students now I think would describe themselves agnostic if they're going to self identify as any kind of belief system as opposed to atheist.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so I think we're starting in a very different kind of point, like, and we've realised that if we take those objections, we're kind of trying to answer the questions that people aren't asking, which is never a good thing to do. And so we've had to kind of have a re-shift and a re-think in terms of how do we then engage people who, you know, it's not only that they haven't had Christian experience, their parents generally haven't been kind of cherished or had any kind of Christian understanding.
00:07:00
Speaker
So it's not so much that they're rebelling against the Christianity of their parents, which is what most atheists were 20 years ago. The strongest atheists were all kind of from a Christian background of some sorts. They're just not rebelling against anything as such in terms of belief system. And there's opportunities that go with that, but there's also some real challenges that go with that.
00:07:19
Speaker
It's really great Michael, just to hear again about the many different ways in which the Lord has placed you to be able to think about Jesus in the continent and also in the UK as well. I'm guessing, well we know, there are different ways aren't there in which we answer some of those, respond to some of those questions if it is in Croatia or if it is in the UK.
00:07:42
Speaker
we're thinking about the UK, how have you had to change the way in which you communicate the gospel and how do you do that in such a way that you don't change the gospel? I imagine that might be one of the questions that kind of comes up every now and again. What does that look like for you? Yeah, so I think taking the second question first if I can and then thinking about it biblically, which is always a good thing to do, one of the things I love about the Acts of the Apostles is that
00:08:10
Speaker
The Apostles throughout the Book of Acts are proclaiming the Gospel and the core of the Gospel is Christ died and rose again. You need to repent and believe and if you do, you'll have forgiveness and the
Communicating the Gospel Effectively
00:08:20
Speaker
gift of the Holy Spirit. That's the core of the Gospel that they get to every time. But their start point is always difference. And so, you know, it may be
00:08:31
Speaker
an incident like a dramatic healing or it may be a question that's been asked or whatever. It may be an idol that is being set up to an unknown god or whatever and they're taking these very different start points but they're getting to the same destination. So I'd say whatever culture we're in, whatever generation we're in, our aim is we want to speak about Christ, we want to proclaim his death and resurrection.
00:08:54
Speaker
But that's rarely the place that we start. We've got to work out what are the touch points, what are the connection points in our culture? How can we build from those things to the core of the gospel? And when there's no framework, this is even more important. And I believe, in a sense, in Acts 17, that's what Paul was doing. He's building this kind of Christian framework, so the gospel makes sense. Remember, we did an international outreach in Bournemouth where I used to live, and there was
00:09:19
Speaker
A lady from East Asia who'd come, she'd kind of heard the gospel in the such that she'd heard that Christ had died for her at Risen, that she needs to repent and believe, and so on. She had made a profession of faith, inverted commas, but nothing seemed to change until one of the local Christians started doing this regular Bible study with her, and they started at the beginning, looked at Genesis chapter one, and God created the heavens and the earth. And she looked at my friend, rather surprised, and she said, oh, God's singular.
00:09:47
Speaker
And my friend was like, well, yeah. And she was like, oh, what about the other ones? So she'd heard the core of the gospel. She'd heard that Jesus had died for her so she could be forgiven, have a relationship with God. And that sounded great. And that sorted the Christian God out, but she had all these other gods. So it was kind of case of like, she'd heard the core of the gospel, but she needed to hear the gospel in context and say,
00:10:06
Speaker
I guess that's one of the things that we're having to do more, not assuming any kind of initial, you know, previous understanding, build the context of a kind of Christian worldview, but then look at where that touches upon and connects with issues that people really care about. And I think one of the things I always say to people is that lots of people today say they're not interested in God or not interested in Christianity, like they're apathetic.
00:10:30
Speaker
But everybody's interested in something. I've never yet met someone who's not interested in literally anything. So the question is, well, what are people interested in? And then how can we build bridges from what they are interested in to the gospel?
Connecting Modern Interests with the Gospel
00:10:42
Speaker
And how does that connect? So for instance, on university campuses, what are the buzz topics today? It's probably topics like equality, topics like human rights, topics like environmental concern. Those are things that exercise people. They get passionate about.
00:10:58
Speaker
Do those things connect to the gospel? Well, of course they do. And in fact, the gospel provides the best foundation for those things, much better than a secular worldview. So I think those give us avenues into thinking about the bigger story of the gospel as in Genesis to Revelation, but then homing in more specifically on the heart of the gospel of Jesus.
00:11:20
Speaker
One of the things I just like about that mission story you told is that's one of the few times I've heard the word international and Bournemouth in the same sentence. I thought that was quite impressive.
00:11:33
Speaker
Michael, obviously, you know, in terms of you, we talk about universities where you spend a lot of your time, you know, you're also a full-time evangelist, and so you spend a lot of time thinking about this. What about folks who don't have the time to say, you know, UI or Christie have to be sort of, you know, reading kind of books and spending our time immersed in all this? How can folks begin to find out what those issues are, you know, among their friends, whether it's university settings or whether people listening to this are in the workplace or wherever? What are some of the ways that we can find those
00:12:02
Speaker
those key issues. Well I always think there's kind of two ways you can do this. One is you can like spend a long time reading all the latest best sellers, kind of trawling through the kind of cultural comments in the middle of the Saturday paper and like watching every film and every new Netflix series and that can be fine but it can kind of be exhausting because you know like in the old days like there were four channels to go through when I was growing up. You could basically watch what everyone was watching and kind of understand what people were thinking about and talking about
00:12:30
Speaker
Whereas now, there is more content that is being digested than there is physically hours in the day. So if we want to stay culturally abreast and we think that means having to watch and read everything, then we're going to be exhausted. So I guess the other option is you can just talk to people. You can actually chat to your neighbors or colleagues.
00:12:50
Speaker
I found a question I stole this of a friend of mine called Bruce and he's he's great because basically this is the question that he asked people he just says to people what are your beliefs and values.
00:13:01
Speaker
That's a very simple question, but it's profound. If you just say to someone, for instance, what are your beliefs? Most people in our culture today say, well, I don't have any because they think by that, like, you know, organized religion. But if you say to someone, what are your beliefs and values? Like no one yet has come back and said, well, I don't have any because it's like open and lots of people will say, well, I don't have beliefs, but I do have values, things that are important to me.
00:13:24
Speaker
And it basically gives them the opportunity to say, well, this is what's really important to me. I'm really passionate about the environment or I'm really passionate about equality or trans rights or whatever it might be. And then that gives you the opportunity to ask more questions. And I believe following the model of Jesus asking questions is a great tool that we have in evangelism.
00:13:44
Speaker
So once you know what their values and their beliefs are, okay, well, how did that come to be? What got you excited about that, got you into that? Why do you think that's really important? Where do you think we get those ideas from is a deeper kind of second level question. Why are these things such big issues?
00:14:04
Speaker
And a lot of people haven't thought through those issues on that kind of level. They're just like, well, obviously they are, aren't they? We all know. I remember, to give you an example, having a conversation with a student.
00:14:15
Speaker
on a train in Hungary and we were travelling from Romania to Hungary, we had like a long time on this train, like longer than anticipated as well. And he was the Environmental Science student and I kind of got chatted and said, okay, why did you study that? And he's like, oh, I'm really passionate about the environment, it's really important. And then I said,
00:14:37
Speaker
like what got you involved and it's like, well, it's really important that we care for the environment. And then I asked him the kind of next level question. I said, well, why do you think it's really, really important? And he looked at me a little bit kind of strange and he said, well, because it is, isn't it? I said, but why? And he's like, well, because it is.
00:14:55
Speaker
Like, everyone knows it is. And then I'm like, well, do they? I mean, if everyone knew that it was important, then surely we wouldn't be in the problem we're in now. The problem is there are some people in the world who don't care about the environments. And so what makes you think that you're right and they're wrong? And he was like, well, because I am. I think you probably are right, but that's not going to win an argument, is it? It's not going to persuade someone if they don't agree with you. And then he's like,
00:15:24
Speaker
Well, why do you think we should care for the environment then?
00:15:26
Speaker
I'm like, well, actually, I think it's got a lot to do with my Christian faith. And he's like, well, how does that work? And then we had a great opportunity to talk about actually how, like, in the Christian understanding, you know, this world doesn't ultimately belong to us, it belongs to God, it's been gifted to us to look after. And therefore, humans have a unique capacity to do good for the world. We can see that we have a unique capacity to screw up the world. And we can certainly see that as well. And the Bible talks about how God's set in place a way of sorting out the mess.
00:15:54
Speaker
And so from his passion, we were able to get to firstly talking about God in general and then eventually talking a bit more specifically about the heart of the Christian faith. So yes, start where people are at and then kind of try to take them on that journey.
00:16:09
Speaker
That's such a great example of a really easy way of excavating and getting beneath the surface of any kind of big question or passion or thing that people care about. I guess in the UK at the moment, we're talking about this earlier on, but there seems to be quite a bit of apathy and you've spoken on apathy for one of the Solas events.
00:16:35
Speaker
How might you go about, what might a conversation like that look like for apathetic friends, family? And what is apathy anyway? I mean, it's something that we hear about quite a bit at the moment, but how do we go about sharing Christ to apathetic hearts?
Engaging with Apathy
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, I guess one thing I'd say is that people are only apathetic about things they don't think matter.
00:17:03
Speaker
So as long as they think that something is unimportant, they'll be apathetic about it. And to be honest, there's lots of things I'm apathetic about, like a whole load, like crochet. I'm sorry, like, you know, for all your listeners that like love crochet. Really? Michael, are you surprised? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, I'm very passionate about Saturday. So if that wins over some other listeners, I don't know. But, you know, sorry, just trying to pluck something off the top of my head.
00:17:28
Speaker
But obviously, if we think something's important, then we will be more passionate about it. And I think for a lot of people, Christianity is an irrelevance. That's why they're apathetic about it. And like I was saying earlier, it's not that people are apathetic about everything. I guess what we need to do is try and find out what they're passionate about.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I think, yeah, to be fair, for some people that's kind of easy, you find it straight away. For some people that is harder, like you've really got to like get to know them or kind of ask a lot of questions to work out, you know, what area does this person really kind of get concerned? What are their real passions? And so I think starting there, you know, and then trying to, I mean, Francis Schafer, the Christian philosopher, he was quite significant in the kind of mid to late 20th century.
00:18:17
Speaker
Anyway, but he talks about taking the roof off someone's position. So in other words, we kind of all live in, like, comfortable houses, like, philosophical houses. And most people in the West are quite comfortable with kind of a functional atheism that's not really thought through. It's just kind of secularism that says, like, everything can be rationally explained and there's a rational explanation for the way we live and so on. And what he says, you need to kind of ask questions so that people kind of have the roof taken off and they start to see the inconsistencies of their own worldview or their own thinking.
00:18:48
Speaker
So to actually help someone, so to give you another example, I remember chatting to another student who said, well, you know, she'd been in the talk, but she hadn't come to the talk that I was giving because she was interested in my talk. She'd come because her friend had invited her and she came for the food, I think. Which is fair enough, you know, like most people do. I'm not egotistical enough to think that most students come because they've looked at the name Michael Ox and they think that's their motivation to come to the talk.
00:19:12
Speaker
But anyway, so she's there. I'm chatting to people after the talk. I basically say to her, like, what did you think of the talk? And she's really honest because she's not British. And she basically says, like, I'm not really interested. And I was like, thanks for your honesty. I said, so what are you interested in? Assuming, like we said, that everyone's interested in something. And she's like, well, I just think love's the most important thing in life. So I said, OK, well, like, could you define it for me? And she's like, well, like, like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, what is love?
00:19:42
Speaker
And she thought for a moment, and she ummed in hard, and she's like, well, I'm not sure. I said, well, can I give you a definition of love? And she said, well, sure. So I said, well, what about this? Love is a chemical reaction that's evolved in our brains to make us attracted to people, generally of the opposite sex, that we reproduce and pass on our DNA. And she kind of looked at me, and maybe because her boyfriend was sitting next to her, she says, well, that's not love. And I said, can you tell me why love is anything more than that? And she's like, well, I'm not sure I can.
00:20:12
Speaker
then she was like well what do you think love is and I said well actually I think it's got a lot to do with God and again we're able to kind of explain from a kind of Christian point of view how love is central to who God is central to who we are because we're creating the image of God and so on and then the next question was well if if love is what it means to be human then why is love so hard to come by which then of course gets to the problem of sin and so on so I mean like they're not all as neat and as quick as that at all like I'm just kind of showing
00:20:37
Speaker
She was like the classical apathetic student who didn't care to hoots about the resurrection of Jesus, which my talk had been on. But she did care about something and trying to kind of tap into that and ask questions. I think the other thing I would say is that, like, obviously a conversation after a fantastic talk with a student, things can happen quite quickly in that environment. Conversations like with my neighbors over the last year, we just recently moved, but we were living somewhere else for 18 months.
00:21:05
Speaker
Like they happen more slowly, like, and that's okay. Our prayer and hope is that those conversations will come up and we're ready and like often drop bait into the conversations to see if things will come up. But yeah, so, but that's the ultimate trajectory. That's what we want to get to. That's what we're wanting to do. It may take longer or shorter, but at least if we know where we're wanting to go, we might get there one day.
Episode Wrap-up and Future Series
00:21:28
Speaker
Brilliant stuff.
00:21:29
Speaker
Michael, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. And I think your book is going to be really helpful to folks. We won't put a link to it in the show notes yet, because it's not out yet, but we'll give it a good plug.
00:21:42
Speaker
when it does and actually for folks to look out for. So next year on the Solas website, we're running a series across the year called Have You Ever Wandered, where we're going to take sort of 25, 26, those kind of topics that Michael's been talking about and sort of just, you know, write little pieces designed to make people think, you know, have you ever wondered about some of these big questions in life? Michael, really grateful that you've taken the time. It's been great having you involved with Solas, with the podcast that you and I do.
00:22:10
Speaker
together, every blessing on all the work that you're doing, excited that you're going to be back doing stuff in person. And in many context now, COVID is over.
00:22:18
Speaker
And thanks once again for joining us on pep talk. Thank you. And from Christy and I, it's goodbye from us. Thanks for joining us. And we'll be back in two weeks time with a different guest, but another topic that will hopefully help you get more confident and excited about sharing faith with your friends and your neighbors and your colleagues. But for now, goodbye.